Four years ago, mid-morning on January 8th, life in Tucson changed. We had actually been one of those towns before, but for whatever reasons, the label did not stick. October 29, 2002 was when a mass shooting, and mass murder, took place at the University of Arizona. But the attempted assassination of a Congressman and a death of little girl born on 9/11/2001 in the the mass shooting of 18 and death of six captured the nation’s attention, like so many other mass shootings.

January 8 2012: I did not write on the first anniversary. In that year I had started becoming acquainted with Ashleigh Burroughs who writes the blog, The Burrow, and felt that I just could not and should not write from Tucson about this event. This was a time for survivors to speak out if they so chose and that I had no right to write and be some sort of a vulture on the subject.

Today I cannot help but to remember how the Old Pueblo came together to support the families of six individuals who lost their lives, and the 12 who lived, but were injured. I remember standing vigil outside University Med Center down the street from my house at twilight and into the evening that day. A friend who is a minister led us in prayer. And I actually prayed and attempted to wrap the survivors in focused loving thoughts and life energy. I rarely ask God, the Goddess, the Universe for anything. The only prayer that means anything to me is a prayer to be vessel of good, of light and love.

Good comes from evil if enough of us choose to build it.

I now know a wonderful writer, another Tucson-based blogger, who was critically injured that day in Tucson. She almost died from her wounds. She just wanted to bring her little friend, a neighbor girl, to meet Gabby. If you want a real story of lives impacted by extended clips and semi-automatic weaponry, read her blog post today that is a letter to Christina-Taylor Green.

I have some really great posts in the works, I have been writing up a storm, but I doubt any of them will appear anywhere today.

Today I cannot help but to remember how the Old Pueblo came together to support the families of six individuals who lost their lives, and the 12 who lived but were injured. I remember standing vigil outside University Med Center down the street from my house at twilight and into the evening that day. A friend who is a minister led us in prayer. And I actually prayed and attempted to wrap the survivors in focused loving thoughts and life energy. I rarely ask God, the Goddess, the Universe for anything. The only prayer that means anything to me is a prayer to be vessel of good, of light and love.

Good comes from evil if enough of us choose to build it.

The evil in Tucson three years ago was not an individual. The evil came from a negligent and greedy society that allowed and continues to allow:

the mentally, emotionally, and neurologically ill to go untreated,

from a weapons industry that propagandizes to justify its massive profits from the retail sale of the technology of killing large number of people in very short amounts of time

hate speech to pass as “news”

career politicians to act in their own interests rather than the interests of their constituents

and, the glorification of violence in media and as entertainment

I knew several of the individuals involved intimately or peripherally that day. In the 1990s I worked with one of the guys shot. I had talked to Gabby several times at events here in Tucson as well as in D.C., she was my Congresswoman, I attended music events with another person who was shot as he was a good friend of a good friend. My husband was in conversation with Gabe, one of those killed, about science innovation in the district. I knew someone else who was in the parking lot that day as the shots were fired and then almost lost his job for talking about his personal beliefs about guns with a reporter. No close friends or family were hurt, thank heavens, but I was shaken. I was transported back to the year I lived in Arlington, VA and the DC sniper was active. One of the deaths was at a shopping center I went to several times a week. I have been touched by gun violence before that too, more than once. I know how long these acts continue to reverberate through lives. It is forever.

I now know a wonderful writer, another Tucson-based blogger, who was critically injured that day in Tucson. She almost died from her wounds. She just wanted to bring her little friend, a neighbor girl, to meet Gabby. If you want a real story of lives impacted by extended clips and semi-automatic weaponry, read her blog post today that is a letter to Christina-Taylor Green.

If you want to help change the world so fewer anniversaries like today’s are observed, act:

Like this:

I once had a little white on black button from the Holocaust Museum in D.C. that simply said, “remember.” My husband borrowed it, and I never saw it again. Somehow that is fitting. Things don’t last. Things vanish. But memories are different. We keep them and review them in grief, and for comfort, until they are worn smooth into polished icons of remembrance.

We got the call from my step-daughter early that day; we didn’t have hours, days or weeks of worry. She was a lovely and quite intelligent young woman, only 25, who worked in lower Manhattan, not all that far from the WTC, and lived in Brooklyn. She was okay. Her building had been evacuated and she was going to have to walk back to Brooklyn that day. Our younger daughter was in 6th grade and the school called because they were concerned about her. She seemed to grasp the enormity of the attacks and was emotionally devastated and raw unlike many of her peers who just did not quite get it. She’d been to the WTC the previous month, August 2001, with her dad, my husband, when he stopped in to see a broker. We didn’t know it then but she would spend 7th grade in Arlington, VA with classmates who lost parents in the attack on the Pentagon. I spent years disseminating real information about the Iraq War that most folks now grudgingly recognize as truth, and during those years many despised me, called me a traitor, and threatened me and my family. It has been a hard 10 years.

I wrote, globally, about the initial thoughts I had on the blog/site I ran at the time called Late Boomers. The three articles I wrote that were “about” the attacks on the U.S. can be read, in the same format in which they appeared then, at:

I have been feeling numb this past week. Perhaps because of the approaching anniversary. Anniversaries of sad events always get to me even if I don’t consciously remember them. This year I have had to add another sad connection to 9/11. This year, on January 8th, Tucson lost a little girl whose 10th Birthday anniversary is tomorrow.

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About Me

I have written and published many blogs over the last 15 years on the topics of Later Born Baby Boomers, Peace & Justice Activism, Virtual Worlds, Gene Stratton-Porter, and Medical Child Abuse. I love research, information and the quest for knowledge. I'm an anthropologist by training, and a freelance content creator by vocation. I love things that make sense, could be, and might be so I enjoy good speculative fiction along the lines of Cory Doctorow and TV shows like Dr. Who and Orphan Black.